Rexcan 4 3D Scanner

[bford903]

I heard about a jewelry cad service using a scanner called the Rexcan 4 3D Scanner for jewelry use. I didn't think 3D scanners, as of now, were capable producing workable scans from something as small as a piece of jewelry.

Anybody here ever seen one or used one?


http://www.solutionix.com/main/bbs/3...r-rexcan4.html

[awerby]

Nope. It's theoretically possible to scan items as small as jewelry, but there are a lot of practical problems. For one thing, it's usually shiny, which is problematic for most optical scanners. Stones are transparent, which also works poorly. And the topographical complexity of many jewelry items mean many scans must be taken and integrated with one another to fill in gaps in a model shot from a single perspective, or even from several. This often causes loss of detail, as the scans are averaged together. It's a lot easier to start with something bigger, made in another material, and scan that, then reduce the scale for printing.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

[JSenior]

You get automatic 5 axis scanners very similar to dental scanners specifically for rings and small jewellery. They can only scan what they see however, so you're unlikely to get vision from all angles and will have holes to fill.

You can also get high resolution macro white/blue light scanners with really small fields of view.

A CT scanner would likely do the best job however.

I haven't got any examples at home, but will try to remember to post some high res scans we've done next week.

[JSenior]

This is a 3D scan of a British £5 note using a Faro Scan Arm HD as a test.

Not really useful for anything, but it gives you an idea of the achievable resolution available now.

[curious aardvark]

not much detail - but amazed that it picked up anything !

So go on, just how many hundreds of thousands of pounds does this thing cost ?

Mind you if you can reproduce printing plates for money from actual money - maybe that's not an issue ;-)